Drexel University’s College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) is proud to welcome seven new faculty members during the Fall 2023 Quarter. These new faculty bring a variety of professional experience and research expertise in areas such as business IT, cybersecurity, software engineering and development, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence and machine learning, ethical design, and natural language processing.
Meet CCI's Newest Faculty Members
Ram Arthanari, PhD
Assistant Teaching Professor, Information Science
Arthanari brings more than 20 years of experience in enterprise project management and research into knowledge sharing frameworks in agile PMOs. He holds a doctorate in business administration from Fox School of Business at Temple University.
Andrew Calhoun
Assistant Teaching Professor, Information Science
Calhoun teaches courses in the BS in Computing and Security Technology (BSCST) program. His courses largely focus on cybersecurity, security awareness, and disaster recovery & business continuity planning. In addition to teaching at Drexel, he serves as a cyber operations officer in the Pennsylvania Air National Guard where he leads airmen in defensive cyber operation missions across the Department of Defense (DoD). As a member of the Air Force, he represents the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in numerous cyber exercises and events in Lithuania as part of the State Partnership Program. He has worked closely with Lithuania’s Regional Cyber Defense Center (RCDC) that is comprised of the United States, Ukraine, Poland, and Georgia. Andrew is also honored to mentor and coach students in Drexel’s CyberCorps program and help Drexel’s veteran community through volunteering with the Veteran Colleague Resource Group.
Trip Denton, PhD
Assistant Teaching Professor, Computer Science
Denton has over 20 years of executive officer and management experience and over 30 years of software development experience. Trip has five advanced technology patents and is experienced with company start-ups and strategic acquisitions and has managed and directed projects with leading universities including UC Berkeley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Vanderbilt University, and IIT Bombay. He graduated from Drexel with BS, MS, and PhD degrees in computer science. He also has a four-year certificate from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Michael Ekstrand, PhD
Assistant Professor, Information Science
Ekstrand’s work blends information retrieval, human-computer interaction, machine learning and algorithmic fairness to try to make information access systems, such as recommender systems and search engines, promote a just, equitable and well-informed society. He was previously at Boise State University, where he co-led the People and Information Research Team. He earned his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2014. He has also held a number of leadership roles in his core professional conference communities, ACM RecSys and FAccT, and maintain the LensKit open-source recommender systems library.
Reza Moradinezhad, PhD
Assistant Teaching Professor, Computer Science
Moradinezhad is passionate about designing trustworthy human-AI interactions. He is an assistant teaching professor at Drexel University's College of Computing & Informatics (CCI), and an AI Scientist at TulipAI. Reza received his PhD from Drexel, focusing his dissertation on how humans build trust toward AI agents. He has collaborated with top institutions including MIT, CMU, and Harvard University, publishing and presenting his work in venues such as Springer Nature and ACM CHI. Reza looks forward to making AI more trustworthy through ethical and responsible design.
Nadya Sultanik
Assistant Teaching Professor, Computer Science
Sultanik is a software architect with over twenty years of experience managing and technically executing computer science and software engineering projects across a variety of application domains. Previous projects focused on automating cognitive workload management for fighter pilots, developing applications for medical care providers to deliver better care, and integrating natural language processing into financial mobile applications. Sultanik holds the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science from Drexel University, with a thesis on facilitating collaboration in virtual environments.
Yue Zhang, PhD
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Prior to joining Drexel's faculty, Zhang was working as a postdoc in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University. He has published more than 40 papers in security conferences (e.g., USENIX Security, ACM CCS, and NDSS) and journals (e.g., TDSC, TPDS). He received a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at ACM CCS 2022, and the Best Paper Award at 2019 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Internet. He has also served on the organization committees of the conferences (e.g., track chair for IEEE MSN) and technical program committee of the conferences (e.g., USENIX Security, NDSS, ACM CCS, RAID). He serves as an editor for the Blockchain Journal, Electronics Journal, and Computers, Materials & Continua Journal. His research had led to the discovery of many vendor-acknowledged vulnerabilities, such as by Bluetooth SIG, Apple, Google, and Texas Instruments, and had attracted intense media attention such as Hacker News and Mirage News.